Le Balcon

Gérard Grisey (1946-1998)
Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil [Four songs for crossing the threshold]
for soprano and 15 musicians

The fact remains that when you devote your time to working with spectres, and to decomposing as much as composing, you end up with ideas from beyond the grave. Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil has no other subject than death, which we can choose here to consider as an end, or, more broadly, as a beyond - beyond the unknown of life, but also beyond existing musical history. The work, as presented by the composer, consists of : "the death of the angel, the death of civilization, the death of the voice and the death of humanity. The four movements are separated by short interludes of inconsistent sound dust, intended to maintain a level of tension slightly above the polite but relaxed silence that reigns in concert halls between the end of one movement and the beginning of the next. The texts chosen belong to four civilizations (Christian, Egyptian, Greek, Mesopotamian) and share a fragmentary discourse on the inevitability of death. The choice of line-up was dictated by the musical need to contrast the lightness of the soprano voice with a deep, heavy yet sumptuous and colorful mass."

Coincidence, premonition or testament, these Quatre chants were not premiered until a year after the composer's untimely death at the age of 52.

Structure

I. The death of the angel
after Les Heures de la nuit by Christian Guez-Ricord

II. The death of civilization
from Middle Kingdom Egyptian sarcophagi

III. The death of the voice
after Erinna

IV. The death of humanity
from The Epic of Gilgamesh